Episode 4 - Weekly IoT News Update

AI and blockchain initiatives have emerged as critical new areas of focus for IT systems buyers in the UK, and acros Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management remain the strongest categories for packaged business applications, with 53% of respondents saying these are priority areas for investment

More than 35,000 retail industry experts and technologies gathered last week in New York for retail's biggest show, the NRF 2018. There, they charted the path ahead for the industry and identified the biggest upcoming trends. The top five were:

India's tech spending will climb 12% in 2018 to reach US$70 billion, while China will see it's budget grow 8% to US$234 billion. Digital transformation has become mainstream amongst Indian businesses, and as a result, a boost in spending on services and outsourcing is expected, including both upstream consulting and downstream implementation.

The first Saudi International Exhibition and Conference for IoT opened Sunday 28th January, representing a major step in supporting Saudi vision 2030, which has allocated a great deal of support for creative and innovative thinking to motivate the Saudi youth. The event was at the Riyadh International Convention and Exhibition Center.

Asia is racing ahead to build the fastest and most powerful computers in the world. An example of this is a machine-human interactive sign which is situated outside a telco shop in the upmarket Gangnam district calls out to potential customers using a supercomputer which is connected to sensors, camera, and speakers. Inside the shop, a robot interacts with customers to recommend cellphones.

Monitoring a newborn’s health is important to all parents. One concern in particular is the risk of cot death (also known as ‘sudden infant death syndrome’) as the exact cause is unknown. Researchers at the University of Sussex have developed a new sensor to allow parents to track their baby’s heart and breathing rates, meaning they can use their smartphones to monitor real-time data.

This ambitious engineering scheme will see three canals, each over 1,000km long and divert 44.8 billion cubic metres of water annually from rivers in southern China and supply it to the arid north, including the cities of Beijing and Tianjin. Over the last year the sensors have been scanning the canal for structural weakness, testing water quality and flow rates, and watching for intruders (both animals and humans). The region’s vulnerability to earthquakes makes it particularly at risk of structural damage. Manually monitoring the canal, particularly its two tunnels, would be extremely difficult, making it a perfect candidate for an IoT solution.

Samsung Electronics is participating in global open source projects one after the other in order to strengthen open ecosystems for next-generation driving forces such as IoT, AI, and OS. The company joined a project called Edge X Foundry in last September. Edge X Foundry has more than 60 members such as Dell EMC and American chip manufacturer Analog Device, to develop IoT technologies for manufacturing.

Ireland’s vast agricultural sector seems destined to adopt new technologies such as IoT and AI to increase production, increase efficiency whilst reducing costs.This will involve the application of advanced data analytics to boost dairy farm productivity by combining existing Dairymaster equipment such as the "MooMonitor" with health and fertility monitoring system and data from new sensors. The plan is to make farms substantially more automated, with the farmer being able to see what areas need the most attention in real-time.

Deutsche Telekom has started deploying NB-IoT tech to improve a smart parking system across Hamburg, with plans in place to roll out up to 11,000 sensors by the end of next year. The app was upgraded this month to include a new functionality that helps users to find empty parking spaces. It collates anonymised Deutsche Telekom network data, weather and calendar data to predict where a space is likely to be free.